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The Cardinals have had a great broadcaster wear number 18, but no great players. 18 was Andy Van Slyke, until he was traded; Keith Hernandez, but only for a couple of years; Luis Alicea, of all people.

It's a Hall of Famer, Dazzy Vance, but only for 150 innings after his 42nd birthday, when he'd finally broken down. It was David Green, of all the ill omens, but only after he'd been packaged up in the Jack Clark trade and exiled to Japan.

18 is a blank slate. It's adjacent to a retired number, Dizzy Dean, and right by Jim Edmonds and Ray Lankford, who just as well could be, but there's not a lot of interference at 18 itself.

I've been kicking around a list of the 100 Greatest Cardinals Of All Time forever, and the first thing you learn when you set out to make a list like that is that there are not really 100 Great Cardinals, not even Of All Time. Guys get traded too soon, or something about their reputation is caught up on the weird, jagged edges of baseball in their own time, and pretty soon you're trying to figure out what anybody ever saw in Ken Reitz, if you're me, or Roy Washburn, if you're my mom, or Jason Isringhausen, if you were born after I started writing about the Cardinals on the internet.

I hope Oscar Taveras's cartoonish home run swing will happen often enough, over the next decade, that he'll be the last guy who ever wears it. Failing that, I hope it'll make it so that every time an Orlando Palmeiro or Chris Duncan or Ivan Cruz or even Kolten Wong wears it, we'll feel like something is a little off.

One step at a time—four plate appearances in a game, 162 games in a season, and so on. Right now I'm hoping he'll chase down Luis Alicea.